Looking for some advice. There is a project set up by a professor that has 3000 observations on it currently. Every year this professor has their students upload observations for collected insects. Unfortunately, these students are given no education or training in how to photograph specimens, so it’s usually taken with a phone from 10 ft away and often of the underside of the insect.
Last year and this year I sent them a message requesting that they spend some time making sure that their students know how to take photos. Regrettably I have had no response to my messages since the project creator never logs on (most recent login was last year, and they have 1 observation).
I found their contact information on their university’s website, and I like to send them an email requesting that they either stop using iNat this way, or at least make it easier on identifiers by training the students how to take pictures.
Would that be crossing any boundaries? Please don’t say to “just skip those observations”, I try to keep things zeroed when possible, that’s the way my system works.
Instead of contacting them directly, I’d submit a help ticket and have iNat staff assess the situation and contact the project owner if deemed necessary. I do think it crosses a line for users to reach out off platform unless an off-platform email is listed in the user’s iNat profile. But it is acceptable for staff to reach out via the provided email when the situation deems it.
Speaking as someone that has been “pursued” across multiple platforms for something that started on iNat.
You might understand more if you were identifier. Trying ID things for people and having page after page from one group of bad, hard to ID photos, makes it needlessly difficult, and means fewer ID’s for the people who took good photos.
I would do exactly what you’re suggesting: email the professor to give them some polite recommendations on how to introduce their students to iNaturalist. iNat users are people, and there’s no prohibition on contacting people through whatever route is most convenient and effective.
My work email is pretty easy to find. But if I were contacted via my work email about something happening on my (personal) iNat account, that would not be well received. This is the exact reason I no longer list my full name on my iNat profile.
This situation is a little different in that it seems the professor is using iNat in a manner directly related to his work (coursework project). However, I still feel like this is a situation best handled by staff rather than individual users, primarily, because individual users have varying thresholds on when such methods are deemed necessary, convenient, or effective.
Alright. I sent a message to the help desk. I’ll see what they say before emailing the professor directly.
I take the point that since their profile has their name, and they made a project for their organization with their organization’s name, than being contacted via an email from their organization’s website shouldn’t be a problem. However, see if iNat staff may reach out first.
I do wonder about this sometimes. In my effort to retrieve some of the uncategorized observations in my area, I have run across a few really egregious cases where someone is obviously doing student projects once a year, and let me start this by saying that many people who do that are obviously working hard to do it well.
However, there are a handful of folks who for years now have been totally ignoring all kinds of best practices, from “label things that are cultivated” to “take photos that focus on something”, to “put all the photos of the same thing in one observation”, all the way up to, “please for the love of baby chickadees check your photos to see if the thing you tried to photograph is not just a blurry blurred blur”. Some of them do this from just one account (where it appears they are uploading all of their students’ photos as separate observations), so it is very, very obvious.
I do not want to get some poor underpaid public school teacher in trouble, but I have to admit that one I time I did look up that name on the school website. I then took a deep breath and did something else for a while, because nobody was forcing me to go through all those observations.
However, I do wonder what the threshold is for getting iNaturalist staff involved. If someone does not respond to comments on observations or to direct messages, how much ignoring of best practices is too much? (It is not
actually against the rules to upload a few uncategorized observations, as far as I can tell. Is it against the rules to upload a few hundred? A few thousand???)
I have run into multiple cases where someone assigning students to make iNat observations haven’t logged on themselves in years. The case above is the worst case because their project has 3000 observations, and I tried twice to DM them, but they never log on, so they didn’t get it.
Sometimes I do run into cases where the teacher does stay on top of their project, but it seems to be the exception and not the rule.
I think there’s a difference between contacting someone outside of iNat to lecture them (which has happened to me) and contacting them because they don’t respond on iNat.
I also don’t think staff has the time or responsibility to reach out to each user who is misusing/misunderstanding the site.
Contacting the iNat staff and letting them solve the delicate problem seems the best option. In general, I think that whether contacting someone outside of iNat is a good idea, depends also on what they have on their profile. If someone has info about their real name, position, or even includes their contact address or link to some platform where you can get their contact details, I would assume that they don’t have anything against contacting them that way. However, if you had to dig for the contact details, or infer the name from the nick first, well it could be thought as crossing the boundaries (as maybe this person prefers to stay “anonymous” and “decoding” their personal info could upset them)
This person doesn’t wish to be anonymous. Their first and last names are on their profile, and the project they have is the university where they are an associate professor. Finding them was as easy going on the university’s web site searching their name.
I agree with the staff approach. If someone is going to be sending kids out to post things on inat, it’s their responsibility to review and vet what’s being posted. I have a class post things, and I personally review every post that they make, mark captive if they failed to do so, suggest IDs if they left that blank, use “as good as it can be” to casual-grade poor pictures, and then tell the kids in-person how they can improve what they’re doing. If the person assigning these kids to use inat hasn’t even been on the website for over a year, it sounds like inat staff should be involved in helping them out.
You are so passionate and knowledgeable about your field that I’m sure you could come across as not lecturing. Especially if you provide links to useful resources (like your bee guides) and try to come across as wanting to be helpful to them and their students, rather than just wanting them to be more useful to you. Maybe a tone of “it’s great that your students are doing this. This is why I am interested in it, and here are some other ways their data would be useful to scientists…”
Most educators should welcome the opportunity to learn. And the university folks and other professionals that I know would not be offended by being contacted through their professional email, about matters pertaining to their field.
Taking an iNat staff first approach may be more appropriate, but would they be more offended by being contacted in that way, by someone who may be perceived as a gatekeeper, than by a friendly researcher?
Good luck. And thanks for such an active bee IDer!
Thanks. Although trying to say: “it’s great that your students are doing this…” reminds me of the line from Christmas Carol: “but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.” But yes, always be diplomatic.